The Particularity of Friendship 

Editors’ Note: This is the second article in a week-long series offering practical advice for adolescents and young adults in the areas of family formation, vocation, career, and friendship. 

A friend, according to Aristotle, is “another self”: one with whom we can grow in virtue and who may thereby help us to better understand ourselves. But today’s social science findings suggest—and everyday life confirms—that America is a place in which connecting with other selves is increasingly doubtful. According to the Pew Research Center, adults younger than fifty are far more likely than those above fifty to feel lonely on a regular basis. Male loneliness, in particular, is said to have reached “epidemic” levels of severity. Just two months ago, Gallup identified young American men as among the loneliest in the West: one-quarter of those aged fifteen to thirty-four reported having felt lonely during much of the previous day. 

Behind the more dramatic headlines, there is the common experience of many young professionals: outwardly thriving as they ascend the meritocratic ladder, while also quietly struggling to form meaningful, authentic friendships. How can they prioritize friendship just as they are expected to complete their studies, launch their careers, and form their families? 

To think through this question, I don’t wish to propose a grand theory of friendship, if only because greater minds have failed to settle on a complete view. Plato’s Lysis is a case in point: a dialogue on friendship that concludes with Socrates’s frank admission that “what a friend is we have not yet been able to find out.” Aristotle’s Ethics, which set the running for models of friendship in the Western tradition, might be said to leave the modern reader with more questions than answers: if friendship is an extension of self-love, is it really genuine concern for the other? Should friendship be so closely associated with rationality? Montaigne suggests not: in a memorable formulation, he locates friendship beyond logical analysis: “Our friendship has no other model than itself, and can be compared only with itself.”    

If so, this points away from brisk definitions of friendship or neat strategies for making friends. Instead, I believe we can derive practical advice from reflecting on two overlooked aspects of friendship: the particularity of friendship (as against the universalizing tendencies of politics and technology) and the familiarity of friendship (as against the modern insistence on utility). We can also consider the distinction between friends and family, and why attention to friendship need not conflict with, and might in fact strengthen, family life.  

Particularity 

It seems to me that much of the disorientation experienced by young people is a function of the modern world’s relentless drive toward the general and the universal. Social media encourage users to generate intense opinions on faraway controversies. College students often care more about the prejudices of their foreign counterparts than the anxieties of their fellow citizens. In general, our culture celebrates the remote and the global: it favors cosmopolitism, not patriotism; humanitarianism, not localism; and distant environmentalism, not careful cultivation. 

But friendship is not universal; it is, as Kant puts it, “not of heaven, but of the earth; it is a peculiar association of specific persons.” In fact, there is a delightful and countercultural particularity about friendship: we are friends with this person rather than that person. We don’t seek equality in this realm: we’re not friends with everybody (though we may bear good will to all), nor could we be, since friendship is a particular kind of relationship marked by distinct moments and memories. A friend is somebody who provokes interest and affection simply for being who they are in their own way. Montaigne encapsulates the radical particularity of friendship: “Because it was he, because it was I.” 

This particularity can also be a source of gratitude. From a theological perspective, finitude is usually meant to highlight the limits of a thing in relation to God: we have finite lives, intelligence, power. But there is also a more positive sense in which finitude is about being a particular sort of thing. Just as we can be grateful for a certain kind of music or architecture or food, we can delight in friends for their unique characteristics and eccentricities. These are gifts that are freely given, and to recognize them as such allows us to be grateful for friendship for its own sake and on its own terms. 

If friendship accords with our natural instinct to start with the particular and then proceed to the general, this suggests key principles for seeking friends in an age of distraction and dislocation. We should attend more closely to the local, to the particular, and to the people and places around us. As embodied beings, our physical proximity matters, and so we should not just assume that we can substitute online or text-based interaction for authentic connection. At the same time, we should cultivate a sense of gratitude, an openness to receiving the gift not just of other selves, but of particular selves—a particularity for which we can be grateful.   

Familiarity 

We should also appreciate friends for who they are, and not what we might wish them to be. In this sense, true friendship is about familiarity, not utility. We delight in friends not because we expect them to do things for us, but simply for the value of what they are and what the relationship means to us. As such, friendship arises from what the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott refers to as “an intimation of familiarity.” (Here it is worth noting that the word “familiar” is rooted in the Latin familiaris, which can mean friendly or belonging to a family.) We are familiar, or intimate with, our friends in a way that is not true of other non-romantic relationships. As Oakeshott observes, we might dispense with the services of a butcher if we found their offerings to be inadequate, but we wouldn’t so easily discard friends for not meeting our expectations. This would be a failure to recognize the non-utilitarian character of friendship. 

To be familiar with our friends—to delight in their particular selves—is to accept them, without any desire to change or improve them. Friends inspire our love, loyalty, and enjoyment, and should not be expected to behave in certain ways or exhibit useful skills. This is why Oakeshott sees friendship as a distinctly conservative disposition: it works with the grain of humanity, affirming messy complexity while eschewing progressive visions of transformation.  

This also applies to the realm of opinions. We need not look to our friends to hold specific views or expect them to change their minds according to our preferences. Friendship in general, and intellectual friendship in particular, proceeds from a ready acceptance of others. This doesn’t mean agreement or approval, but stands as the condition of intimacy and mutual growth. To share something of ourselves, including our ideas, is to suggest pathways of wisdom, not to enforce compliance. At a time of polarization and online echo chambers, it is more important than ever to retrieve the virtue of friendship across ideological differences. 

For ambitious young people, the non-utilitarian dimension of friendship is particularly significant. Our meritocratic culture can make it all too easy to conflate “connections” with friends and to confuse “networking” with sharing. Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits has argued that a meritocratic system that penalizes deficiencies in skill and effort will generate resentment and ultimately destructive political outcomes. On the level of friendship, I also wonder if meritocracy is a corrosive force, recasting potential friends as professional rivals who might alternately aid or impair our advancement.  

It is not easy to escape the logic of transactional relationships on campus or in our careers, but we might draw some helpful starting points from a focus on friendship as a bond of familiarity. We should not require that our friends embody merit or usefulness. Of course, higher education and early adult life will bring us into contact with such people, but we must remember that this is also a season for enjoyment and experimentation. We should ask not what our friends can do for us, but whether they inspire delight and devotion on account of the relationship itself. Above all, we should accept our friends for who they are, not only because this will produce closer ties, but also because the habit of valuing something for its own sake will be fruitful in other contexts. 

Family 

I began with the question of how young professionals might be expected to make and keep friendships while attending to expanding responsibilities at home or at work. But my own experience of marriage and family has suggested that this is not quite the right way to think about the issue. It is precisely because of the nature of friendship that it is so valuable in helping us navigate the proliferating burdens of adult life. Friends don’t prevent us from focusing on other life goals; they enlarge our scope for navigating them.  

If friends accept and delight in one another, without expecting anything in return, they will be positioned to bear the weight of provocations that other relationships might not easily sustain. In this way, the playfulness of friendship turns out to encompass a profound dimension, too. We sometimes need to be able to play, to blow off steam, or to explore half-formed ideas in ways that might be unwise to replicate with a spouse or family member. Friends have a certain freedom to share ideas or engage the imagination, without expecting to achieve a specific goal.  

In the end, friendships provide us with roots and connections in a world that is, especially for young people, so often unsettled. We make friends with particular people in particular circumstances, and for this reason we should not allow ourselves to be distracted by what is remote and abstract. We should delight in and give thanks for those we can know, love, and enjoy in reality. These other selves are not always agreeable, or meant to be profitable, but they will be irreplaceable.  

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